In the autumn of 2022 the Society launched Written in History, a campaign to fund the conservation of 12 volumes of letters sent in to Assistant Secretary’s office of the Geological Society between 1834 and 1880.
Thanks to the generosity of numerous donors Written in History reached its target in the summer of 2024 which allowed us to conserve all of the volumes. For the first time we can now read letters which have not been looked at since they were originally bound into the volumes around 150 years ago.
About the Assistant Secretary's Letter Books
The Assistant Secretary was usually the first point of contact with the Society. As the post holder could also act as journal editor, Librarian and Museum Curator, the majority of the Society’s day-to-day business and administration came through his office.
The letters are therefore one of the primary records of the activities of the Society and its Fellows in the 19th century.
Left: a view of the letters inside a volume being covered in soot.
Right: a typical quarter leather binding of a Letter Book.
The binding of this volume had collapsed, pushing the block of letters outside of the boards. As a result the letters were being damaged on all sides.
What was the problem?
There are around 8,000 letters split across 19 volumes. Volumes 1-7 were conserved in the 1980s, but the remaining 12 letter volumes were still in their original format of cheap, guard-book bindings. Guard-books were a very common and economical way of collating loose papers in the Victorian period. Instead of modern paper folders, loose pages were pasted onto the stumps inside.
The positive is that the contents were kept together. The downside was the poor-quality leather spines degraded and split, leading to the collapse of the binding. Two centuries' worth of soot and London pollution had coated the letters inside, which formed a fine dust that was moved and transferred when the volumes were handled. The dirt caused extensive acidic deterioration and discolouration which made the paper hard and brittle. This was particularly noticeable along the edges, which curled and flaked, with corners breaking off.
In order to prevent any further damage they had to be closed off to researchers.
How the funding helped
All the letters underwent a conservation process to clean and stabilise them to make the accessible to researchers.
Left: the binding and sewing is broken in order to release the individual letters which are still attached to their guards.
Right: the letters are then immersed in a warm bath of water to wash them. Washing the paper removes some of the acidity—as evidenced by the discolouration of the water. The red spots are sealing wax which was frequently used instead of glue.
The letters are air-dried before being pressed to flatten them. Finally they are housed in archival polyester sleeves (which protects them during future handling) and placed in an archival standard box.
Examples of conserved letters
Request for a pay rise, 1843
Letter from Charles Nichols, 5 April 1843 (Ref: GSL/L/R/8/12)
Information about staff who worked for the Society in the 19th century can be scanty. However the conserved Letter Book series has filled in some of the gaps.
For instance this letter is from the clerk Charles Nichols who began his employment with the Society in November 1839. His duties were essentially to do all work asked of him by the Assistant Secretary, be in attendance at the meetings and work 7½ hours a day in the winter and 8½ hours in the summer. For that he was paid a yearly salary of £75 and allowed one month’s holiday in the summer.
The Assistant Secretary’s duties were quite onerous as the postholder was required to be the Librarian, editor of the journal and run the entire administrative side of the Society. That Nichols was likely to have been called on to support the incumbent quite heavily is evidenced by this being the second request for a pay rise. The first in October 1840 saw his wages rise to £84 per annum.
In 1842 the Assistant Secretary William Lonsdale (1794-1871) left due to poor health brought on by overwork. Going by the contents of this letter, Nichols seems to have had to take on the burden of much of his work too. He writes “The salary I am at present receiving, is, I have found, insufficient to meet the respectability & credit due to the office I have the honor to hold; a position which exposes me to many little liabilities and disbursements: the numerous & arduous duties also, which press upon me, call for the devotion of most of my private hours, which before were otherwise directed.”
The ‘little liabilities & disbursements’ were the expectation that he would have to pay numerous bills out of his own pocket and claim the money back. More interestingly is the hint of what he did in his private hours before taking up employment as the clerk. This could be his side career as a society entertainer under the stage name ‘Charles Charles’.
Nichols’ request was successful and his wages rose to £100 per annum.
Travelling artist in the American Frontier, 1849
Letter from George Catlin, 7 May 1849 (Ref: GSL/L/R/11/56)
George Catlin (1796-1872) was an artist and sometime geologist who travelled around the American West in the 1830s obsessively capturing the portraits and culture of the various indigenous ‘Indian’ tribes that were still settled in their homelands—just before they were wiped out by disease, the decimation of the buffalo population and forcible removal under US legislation. By 1837 Catlin had accumulated around 500 portraits and a substantial quantity of artefacts which were displayed in his own travelling museum that visited a number of cities along the east coast of America. In 1839 he brought the collection to Europe which included a three year stop off in London where it was exhibited at the famous Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly.
This letter dates from a period when his finances were exhausted, mainly due to the costs of transporting his immense collection, renting out halls and paying for the upkeep of members of the Ojibwe and Iowa tribes (who would recreate various scenes for the benefit of audiences). Despite this Catlin was keen to embark on a further exploratory trip, this time to the Rocky Mountains and was seeking financial assistance from various institutions.
Catlin did not receive funding from the Society, and after spending part of 1852 in a London debtor’s prison he was forced to sell his precious portrait collection to a Pennsylvania railroad tycoon who subsequently donated it to the Smithsonian Museum.
Discovery of the Euskelosaurus, a dinosaur from South Africa, 1866
Letter from Alfred Brown, Aliwal North, 8 January 1866. (Ref: GSL/L/R/17/297)
Alfred “Gogga” Brown (1834-1920) was an English born, self-taught palaeontologist and naturalist who discovered numerous new species of reptiles, dinosaurs and fish in Cape Colony, South Africa. His day jobs as a teacher, librarian, postmaster and county clerk in his local town surprisingly left him ample time to pursue his obsession with geology.
This letter from Brown, dated 8 January 1866, is written to Sir Roderick Murchison (1792-1871). It contains a long description of what he believes to be fossilised reptilian bones and teeth which he has discovered in the Stormberg Mountain range. He writes “I felt it my duty to hand them over to gentlemen in my native country who were competent to judge of them, and after considerable hesitation I resolved to make known my discovery.”
The bones were sent to Murchison who passed them onto the comparative anatomist (and Fellow of the Society) Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895). They formed the basis of Huxley’s paper “On some Remains of large Dinosaurian Reptiles from the Stormberg Mountains, South Africa”, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, Vol 23 (1867). The largest bones were fragments of two femurs which he estimated would have been around 3 feet in length. Huxley named the new dinosaur Euskelosaurus Browni in honour of its discoverer.
List of donors
We would like to thank the following donors for generously sponsoring the conservation of the Letter Books:
| Volume 8 (1843-1844) | Sponsored by The Dolan Charitable Trust |
| Volume 9 (1844-1846) | Sponsored in memory of Pieter Michiel Maurenbrecher, FGS (1945-2021) |
| Volume 10 (1847-1848) | Sponsored by Graham Goffey |
| Volume 11 (1848-1851) | Sponsored by The Dolan Charitable Trust |
| Volume 12 (1851-1853) | Sponsored in memory of Elspeth Urquhart, PhD, FGS (1949-2019) |
| Volume 13 (1853-1856) | Sponsored by Richard Stabbins |
| Volume 14 (1856-1859) | Sponsored in memory of Anthony Stephen Batchelor, PhD, FREng (1948-2022) |
| Volume 15 (1859-1863) | Sponsored by The Dolan Charitable Trust |
| Volume 16 (1863-1864) | Multiple sponsors |
| Volume 17 (1863, 1865-1866) | Sponsored by The de Laszlo Foundation |
| Volume 18 (1867-1871) | Sponsored by The Dolan Charitable Trust |
| Volume 19 (1872-1880) | Multiple sponsors |
If you would like further information about the Letter Books please contact the Library on library@geolsoc.org.uk